I follow you by moonlight, by candlelight; by footsteps on damp cobblestone and the flutter of your cloak.

You jovial beast. Your arm wound 'round the currier's as if you were brothers by blood, fat on your summer's profits and snug in the bosom of camaraderie. Chuckling another midnight hour away, merry with ale or cider or whatever cheap swill you've carried out of The Laughing Stocks; it's sloshing all over your boots with each unsteady step -

I could follow you by the smell alone.

Firebreak Road is gentle by moonlight, quieter than quiet as the night bleeds into early, early day. You part ways at the avenue, the currier towards his home - are there children, do you think? perhaps a wife, perhaps her sister, a maiden aunt ever pining by the window for what was never hers - but you, you wheezing pig, you have miles yet to go and the way is unobstructed, the road is broad and empty -

I am a shadow upon the wheelwright's roof, a ghost when I leap the narrow alleyway; you never hear my boots hit the tiles.

You've a wife awaiting you as well, I think; I dream her for you, watery eyes and a placid manner, a deft hand in the kitchen and a fondness for women's work. Monstrous me; I fancy her hands wringing at the apron as she waits by the door for, as you do every night, you're walking where once the Ashfiend roamed and savaged and burned. She worries. She frets, for while the ghost of woodsmoke and old massacre has not blunted your years-long habit, she's inclined towards superstition -

The chapel's tall shadow extinguishes your details.An uneven road, a drunk's heavy boots. You stumbleand I am on you in an instant, a black-clad spectre, fluttering cape silhouetted against the moon as I leap -

We struggle, you and I. The twine around your throat - once, twice - and we're into the alley wall now, you and me and all our breathless desperation, all your squeaky gasps and this is the rough-and-tumble of a body gone larger than it ought to

what do they feed you Myrken men?Meaty arms and a stubborn thick neck; I can smell the bacon on your breath, anyone could, it's like a disease, thick and pungent and I'm gagging on the stench of it, retching 'til the tightening noose makes all that breath just stop. We struggle, you and I, but not for very long now: this is the twitching distress of thoughtless limbs, the mind gone far, far away and when we tumble down onto the dirt you almost kill me, you're flattening me, the breath gone out of my lungs but there's enough left, just enough, for laughing with wild surprise -

Your throat sucks down breath when I slacken the rope. With a sound like storms, like howling prayers: a relief so impenetrable that you never hear the words I whisper by your hair, never feel the knife until it's sunk so deep that nothing you might do could possibly matter. Glorious, I loom - as you reach, not for my ankles and not for the knife, but for what's spilling out of you with every pump of your dying heart. Resplendent, I lift my hands to the adoring sky, a beast amongst beasts and stranger than most. If only you could see how I vanish back into the alley's depths! If only you could see the dashing flutter of my cloak, the moonlight in my eyes as I make my escape.

Next time, I promised, softly by your ear. Next time you can be the hunter and I'll be the prey.